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this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Update on the University of Zurich's AI experiment: Reddit's considering legal action against the researchers behind it.
apparently this got past IRB, was supposed to be a part of doctorate level work and now they don't want to be named or publish that thing. what a shitshow from start to finish, and all for nothing. no way these were actual social scientists, i bet this is highly advanced software engineer syndrome in action
This is completely orthogonal to your point, but I expect the public's gonna have a much lower opinion of software engineers after this bubble bursts, for a few reasons:
Right off the bat, they're gonna have to deal with some severe guilt-by-association. AI has become an inescapable part of the Internet, if not modern life as a whole, and the average experience of dealing with anything AI related has been annoying at best and profoundly negative at worst. Combined with the tech industry going all-in on AI, I can see the entire field of software engineering getting some serious "AI bro" stench all over it.
The slop-nami has unleashed a torrent of low-grade garbage on the 'Net, whether it be zero-effort "AI art" or paragraphs of low-quality SEO optimised trash, whilst the gen-AI systems responsible for both have received breathless hype/praise from AI bros and tech journos (e.g. Sam Altman's Ai-generated "metafiction"). Combined with the continous and ongoing theft of artist's work that made this possible, and the public is given a strong reason to view software engineers as generally incapable of understanding art, if not outright hostile to art and artists as a whole.
Of course, the massive and ongoing theft of other people's work to make the gen-AI systems behind said slop-nami possible have likely given people reason to view software engineers as entirely okay with stealing other's work - especially given the aforementioned theft is done with AI bros' open endorsement, whether implicitly or explicitly.